It’s a day for the daring, with the premiers of a number of high-profile experimental filmmakers. Jerry Tartaglia looks back at the work of Jack Smith in ‘Escape From Rented Island’, Irene Lusztig overlaps the voices of female letter writers in the 70s with those of present-day women in ‘Yours in Sisterhood’, and Barbara Hammer uses moving translucent images of the body imposed on film reels to explore the body’s cycles of life and death in ‘Evidentiary Bodies’. Each director here examines the need for archiving, questioning the ways we document, and keep visible, communities that have previously been shunned to the shadows of history.

The TEDDY AWARD is itself involved in the preservation of queer cultural memory through its partnership with the Queer Academy. Delve into the history of LGBT cinema by checking out the website here: https://queeracademy.net

Happy Wednesday Watching!

Escape From Rented Island: The Lost Paradise of Jack Smith

Director: Jerry Tartaglia

Akademie der Künste, 21:30

In his essay film, Jerry Tartaglia, longtime archivist and restorer of the film estate of queer New York underground, experimental film, and performance legend Jack Smith, deals less with Smith’s life than with his work, analyzing Smith’s aesthetic idiosyncrasies in 21 thematic chapters. “Escape From Rented Island: The Lost Paradise of Jack Smith is a film essay about the artist’s work, rather than a documentary about his life. Therefore, it does not present a rational, linear, and detached explanation of his work. Instead, it asks the viewer to sympathetically experience the aesthetic choices behind the work of Jack Smith. This strategy that I have chosen creates a challenge for the viewer, particularly those who are reliant upon external commentary or non-diegetic material in the documentary film form; I have no apology to offer those who cannot bear the unmediated vision of Jack Smith; only an invitation to join him in his lost paradise.”

There aren’t many people who live their lives without at least a few mummy or daddy issues – they’re almost a rite of passage. And that’s our theme of the day, with many of today’s films examining the tangled and complex relationships we have with our parents. But brace yourselves, these are not your average stories of family squabbles; in these films we realise the extreme and damaging effects of families in disarray. In ‘Game Girls’ we see women forced onto the street by abusive parents, ‘Marilyn’ reveals the devastating consequences of repressed desire and familial rejection, ‘Retablo’ sees a young boy coming to terms with his father’s sexuality, and ‘The Silk and the Flame’ exposes the crippling repression inflicted by Chinese family expectations.

Game Girls

Director: Alina Skrzeszewska

France/Germany 2018 90′, English

CineStar 7, 17:00

Skid Row in Los Angeles is the infamous ‘homeless capital’ of the USA. Anyone who is trying to learn the rules of the game and survive here has a really tough time, as the stories of the two protagonists of this film, Teri and Tiahna, reveal. Life for this lesbian couple is
a constant round of prison, alcoholism and drug peddling, but there is hope, too. Their biographies are typical for the lives of Afro- American women living on the edge of American society. During a workshop initiated by the filmmaker for women in this community, they address their memories and their traumas and embark on a process of transformation during which they come into view as self- determining subjects rather than as victims. Social protests against homelessness in the neighbourhood, or the ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaign are just as much a part of their lives as is the matter-of-fact way in which they choose to live as lesbians, or their bitter struggle with the authorities for their own four walls. The film’s intimate, observational camerawork helps tell the story of two women who manage to escape Skid Row but who are nonetheless bound by the constraints of their environment.

It’s Day 3 of the Berlinale and where do we start with today’s vast selection?! For the classics-lovers out there, Rupert Everett’s ‘The Happy Prince’, detailing the final chapter of openly gay, British author Oscar Wilde’s life, is right up your street. But if you’re looking for something a bit more daring, today’s schedule contains some of the most radical and challenging films of the TEDDY 2018. ‘Shakedown’ is an almost entirely VHS-shot documentation of the eponymous black lesbian club-night, ‘Garbage’ sees the return of controversial Indian director Q in a film that drastically deconstructs masculinity, and the experimental short ‘Contra-Internet’ takes us into a dystopian, post-internet, post-sexual realm. If that’s not enough to satisfy you then there’s plenty more to float your boat in this action-packed timetable so get watching!

Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033

Director: Zach Blas

USA/Great Britain 2018 29′, English, Spanish

Akademie der Künste, 19:00

Inspired by Derek Jarman’s 1978 queer punk film Jubilee, Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033 follows Ayn Rand and members of her Collective, including Alan Greenspan, on an acid trip in 1955. Casting Susanne Sachsse as Ayn Rand, Zach Blas stages a psychedelic fever dream that sees the philosopher and her hangers-on transported to a dystopian future Silicon Valley. As Apple, Facebook, and Google campuses burn, their guide, artificial intelligence Azuma, reveals that Ayn has become a celebrity philosopher to tech executives, as her writings foster their entrepreneurial spirit. Amidst the wreckage, Rand and The Collective are introduced to the Internet and bear witness to techies being captured by anti-campus groupies. Inside an occupied office park, the group encounters Nootropix, a contra-sexual, contra-internet prophet, who lectures on the end of the internet as we know it. Seeking respite, Rand and The Collective find themselves at Silicon Beach, where chunks of polycrystalline silicon mix with sand and ocean.